]]>http://feministing.com/2015/07/31/daily-feminist-cheat-sheet-625/feed/0Stay in your lane: We don’t need rich white actresses’ comments on sex workhttp://feministing.com/2015/07/31/stay-in-your-lane-we-dont-need-rich-white-actresses-comments-on-sex-work/
http://feministing.com/2015/07/31/stay-in-your-lane-we-dont-need-rich-white-actresses-comments-on-sex-work/#commentsFri, 31 Jul 2015 19:04:23 +0000http://feministing.com/?p=108848A group of rich and famous white actress/feminists who have probably never in their life traded sex or experienced criminalization have added their rich and famous names onto a letter condemning a proposal from Amnesty International to adopt a position to support the decriminalization of sex work.

Amnesty’s proposal, which is in line with the position of many major public health and human rights organizations, states that “The available evidence indicates that the criminalisation of sex work is more likely than not to reinforce discrimination against those who sell sex, placing them at greater risk of harassment and violence, including ill-treatment at the hands of police.” Seems like pretty solid logic, no?

Their position is misguided in several ways, probably most obviously because if you think about it for more than like two seconds in a row, you’d realize that if you asked people who trade sex themselves what they want, cops, arrests, overnight stays in jail, and court appearances probably don’t rank highly. Even if we’re talking about the “Nordic model,” in which criminalization shifts from those who trade sex to those who purchase sex, criminalization is a misguided direction based on the principle of saving women and children, and not in tune with evidence suggesting that full decriminalization actually helps keep sex workers safe. And don’t get it twisted: even though people who trade sex come in all genders, the foundation of these arguments around criminalization is that women and young people don’t know what’s best for themselves and need saving.

But guess what white feminists: even though it would be nice, I’m not even asking for you to think for more than two seconds in a row. One option is to actually ask people who trade sex themselves (game-changer, I know). You don’t even have to do the work. A recently released ground-breaking study asked LGBTQ youth who trade sex to meet basic survival needs where they experienced violence, and found that young people experience a lot of violence at the hands of law enforcement and the service agencies that are meant to keep them safe. When asked what they needed, young people in the sex trades said that they needed housing, employment, access to education, support.

This is not to suggest that people who trade sex are a monolith with one single opinion. There is a lot of heated disagreement on this among people who trade sex themselves and some who trade sex currently or who did so formerly do oppose decriminalization.

But here is what we know: policing and criminalization lay their biggest burdens on the most vulnerable people in our societies. We have discussed this here at length: police use of condoms as evidence of prostitution-related charges is just one example of the ways that criminalization puts the health, life, and safety of people who trade sex at risk (with trans women of color being particularly vulnerable to this kind of police profiling and harassment). But we can also see this in the case of Marissa Alexander, a Black woman who was criminalized for firing a few warning shots to protect herself and her child from her abuser. We can see this in all the cases when family members of people with mental illness called the police for help when things have escalated beyond their control, only to have police officers show up and kill their family membersinstead ofhelp them. We can see this in the ways that police target and harass LGBTQ people of color. We can hear this in all the stories of people who have called the police for help only to experience further harassment, violence, or death because they weren’t wealthy or white.

At this point — one year after the murders of Eric Garner and Mike Brown set off the nation in a dialogue about the ways the police perpetuates violence against the most vulnerable people in our communities (and Black folks in particular), just weeks after Sandra Bland died in police custody — it takes more mental gymnastics than ever to imagine that criminalization and policing could provide any safety to people as marginalized and publicly stigmatized as those who trade sex. This is especially true if we’re talking about people who trade sex who are street-based. It’s especially true for people who trade sex who are Black or of color, who are trans or gender non-conforming, who are immigrants, who are poor, who are several or all of those at once. These are the people whom criminalization most targets — not rebellious college students who decide to give sex work a whirl, not the high-class girls working for elite agencies with whom politicians routinely get caught. It’s folks with records, folks who have no place to stay for the night, folks who might end up in deportation proceedings. It’s people who the police know they can extort sex from because they won’t be believed if they come forward with their experiences of sexual assault, people whose lives are routinely and systemically fucked up by criminalization.

But y’all think criminalization will help.

Stay in your lane, rich ladies. People who trade sex are organizing, leading research projects, creating political analysis, and identifying solutions. People who trade sex need people to listen to them. And they don’t need you.

]]>http://feministing.com/2015/07/31/stay-in-your-lane-we-dont-need-rich-white-actresses-comments-on-sex-work/feed/0How to slash the cost of child care while raising workers’ wage to $15/hourhttp://feministing.com/2015/07/31/how-to-slash-the-cost-of-child-care-while-raising-workers-wage-to-15hour/
http://feministing.com/2015/07/31/how-to-slash-the-cost-of-child-care-while-raising-workers-wage-to-15hour/#commentsFri, 31 Jul 2015 18:00:35 +0000http://feministing.com/?p=108862As the Fight for 15 movement keeps collecting wins, the “Make it Work” coalition is pushing to raise the wages of child care workers and preschool teachers next — while simultaneously reducing the skyrocketing costs of child care for families. At The Nation, Michelle Chen reports on their proposal:

The campaign, launched this week by the Make it Work coalition, lays out a multi-pronged proposal for making “high quality, flexible care more affordable and accessible for all families”. Through federal funding and workforce reforms, this would provide “Guaranteed childcare subsidies for middle-and low-income families… to ensure that child care costs no more than 10 percent of pay,” and wage floor for educators and caregivers of $15 an hour. Families would have access to public preschool for all three and four year-olds, with greater investment in early childhood programs like Head Start. The proposal was also boosted in a new House resolution by Representatives Keith Ellison, Bonamici and Raul Grijalva supporting the $15-an-hour minimum wage and federally funded expansion of childcare and educational programs.

The proposal, which would raise the number of kids receiving subsidies to 26 million from the current 1.5 million, would extend programs like Headstart to full-day services, providing more stable schedules for clients and staff that accommodate unstable or fulltime workdays. Workers would be able to draw on financial support for supplemental “education, training and professional development.” They would also be encouraged to join “professional organizations” to strengthen working conditions, potentially opening the door to unionization.

As Chen notes, the fact that this majority female workforce earns poverty-level wages — which haven’t increased for nearly two decades — “reflects a general undervaluing of care work.” And Make It Work’s proposal reflects the reality that this will not and cannot change without federal funding. Since this labor is unpaid when performed by parents — still typically mothers — within the home, when it is performed outside the home, it will be both underpaid and too expensive.

“As child care costs skyrocket, becoming out of reach for even middle class families, working men and women are forced to make impossible choices, that aren’t real choices at all,” Make it Work’s proposal notes. “Increasingly more and more women are opting out of the workplace to take care of a new child, in part because child care is just too expensive.” Meanwhile, workers are earning so little that they’re “unable to provide the basics for [their] own children.”

The current status quo is thus driving both poverty and gender inequality, and only generous subsidies — to reduce the cost and raise the wage — will solve this structural dilemma.

]]>http://feministing.com/2015/07/30/daily-feminist-cheat-sheet-624/feed/0K-12 girls: Exercise your right to equity in sports!http://feministing.com/2015/07/30/k-12-girls-exercise-your-right-to-equity-in-sports/
http://feministing.com/2015/07/30/k-12-girls-exercise-your-right-to-equity-in-sports/#commentsThu, 30 Jul 2015 20:00:05 +0000http://feministing.com/?p=108784Title IX, the law that prohibits sex discrimination in education, is 43 years old. Yet huge disparities still exist in athletic opportunities for young girls and boys. That gap exacerbates inequalities in education, employment, and health. Not only are sports fun, but they promote girls’ success and well-being off the field. Girls who play sports get better grades and earn more wages in higher-skill positions. Black female athletes are more likely to graduate from college than their non-athlete peers. And youth exercise leads to lower rates of breast cancer and depression for girls.

Want to close the gap between girls’ and boys’ sports? Want to stand up for your rights as a young athlete? A new video from the Legal Aid Society – Employment Law Center (where I just happen to be interning this summer) provides a great primer on Title IX guarantees for girls’ sports in just a few minutes.

After watching the video and sharing it with girls in your life, learn more about Title IX and sports here.

Ayah: Overall, girls who play sports get better grades and have higher scores on standardized tests than non-athletes.

Fiona: And athletes are more likely to graduate from high school and go to college than those who don’t play sports.

Cara: Research shows, once they start working, girls who play sports in high school go on to earn 7% more than their non-athlete peers.

Fiona interview: It’s really important for me to see gender equity in sports. Especially comparing myself and some boy relatives that I have that have gone on to play collegiate athletics. I feel myself saying I can do that, but I’m going to do that on the women’s side of things. I can get the same equipment, I can play at the same facilities, work out at the same facilities, that is my goal. And with title IX, I can do that.

Ireland Interview: I cannot imagine my life without sports. I would say it would be incomplete; there would be something missing. Having physical activity, having a set time where you do things, it helps you with structure. It just helps regulate my life.

Interview Sumi: I definitely want to play sports just as much as my brother wants to. Just because we’re different genders doesn’t make anything different.

Fiona: Title IX is a federal law that applies in California and throughout the nation that says there can be no discrimination based on gender in public schools.

Fiona: This means no unequal treatment of boys and girls, in educational programs, including athletics.

Fiona: The law applies to all public elementary, middle, and high schools, including charter schools, colleges and universities.

Sumi: The law requires looking at the entire athletic program, not just one or two teams, to see whether girls and boys have equal treatment and benefits throughout the program.

Sumi: For example, girls and boys must have equal:

Field quality

Gyms and locker rooms

Quality and number of coaches

Equipment

Scheduling of games and practice times

Cara: The law requires schools to oversee booster clubs, sports fundraising, and donations to ensure equal resources are enjoyed by girls and boys teams alike.

Fiona: Boys and girls must have equal participation in school sports.

Ayah: So if there are 1000 students at a school, 500 girls and 500 boys, and 100 students play on school sports teams, then 50 of those students playing sports must be girls and 50 must be boys.

Sumi: The law also prohibits retaliation against a student, parent, or coach, for example, who talks about Title IX or requests equity in their school sports program.

Ayah: If you talk to someone, like a principal, because you think your school isn’t following Title IX, you shouldn’t be disciplined for taking action.

Sumi: Another important law for equity among girls and boys in sports is AB 2404, the Fair Play in Community Sports Act.

Sumi: The Fair Play Act is a CA law similar to title IX that requires equal treatment of girls and boys in community youth competitive athletics programs hosted by Parks & Rec Departments of California.

Sumi: The Fair Play Act also applies to private sports programs that use park & rec facilities, like club soccer.

Ayah: Look around. Does your school or park program treat girls equally in comparison to boys?

Ayah: If you see inequality in your sports program, take action and speak up!

Gender equity in sports is required by law!

Ayah: If you need help you can contact: Fair Play for Girls in Sports, a project of the Legal Aid Society-Employment Law Center

]]>http://feministing.com/2015/07/30/k-12-girls-exercise-your-right-to-equity-in-sports/feed/0Quote of the Day: “Poor women don’t have choice.”http://feministing.com/2015/07/30/quote-of-the-day-poor-women-dont-have-choice/
http://feministing.com/2015/07/30/quote-of-the-day-poor-women-dont-have-choice/#commentsThu, 30 Jul 2015 18:30:59 +0000http://feministing.com/?p=108808Today’s QOTD goes to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who continues to speak frankly about the unequal state of abortion rights in this country.

“Reproductive freedom is in a sorry situation in the United States. Poor women don’t have choice.”

As I wrote at Pacific Standard the other day, the Hyde Amendment preventing Medicaid from covering abortion may be the policy that most directly strips poor women of their right to choose. Certainly, it’s the one most obviously intended to do so. Back when it was first passed in the ’70s, Rep. Hyde himself admitted that he’d like to prevent anyone — “a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman” — from getting an abortion if he could, but “unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the… Medicaid bill.”

But it’s really the cumulative effect of all the anti-choice state restrictions that contribute to this reality — putting barrier after barrier until the cost is so high that only the economically privileged can meet it.

]]>http://feministing.com/2015/07/30/quote-of-the-day-poor-women-dont-have-choice/feed/0Instead of trolling a lion hunter, we should #SayHerNamehttp://feministing.com/2015/07/30/instead-of-trolling-a-lion-hunter-we-should-sayhername/
http://feministing.com/2015/07/30/instead-of-trolling-a-lion-hunter-we-should-sayhername/#commentsThu, 30 Jul 2015 17:30:13 +0000http://feministing.com/?p=108772The recent social media onslaught against a feckless lion-killing Minnesota dentist tells us a lot about the nature — and uselessness — of online outrage, especially when directed at a single target.

To be quite sure, the murderous DDS was indeed responsible for a stunning tragedy: killing a beloved lion in a Zimbabwe national park and then beheading him for the sake of a trophy. The bloody practise drips with ugly anachronisms, from being a shabby and pathetic display of masculine prowess that demonstrates the ultimate poverty of manhood as an idea, to the colonialist overtones of a white man paying 50,000 dollars to fly to an African nation and turn some of its endangered fauna into a home decoration. The entire thing is ugly and and constitutes a moral crime.

But one tweet stands out amid the social media wreckage that the entire sorry affair has produced:

It’s times like this that I don’t find myself cursing Twitter’s character limit. It took only a few words to point out everything wrong with the social media outpouring that Cecil the Lion’s death has created. You see, amidst all the social media backslapping, mockery, trolling, and inevitable doxing and death threats, not only will nothing change regarding the appalling state of our environmental stewardship, but we lost our already precarious sight of a larger problem that has generated a much narrower band of outrage: we are learning as a society, irrefutably, that people of color, especially Black Americans, are dying in police custody at an alarming rate.

While Sandra Bland’s case is paradigmatic of this silent atrocity, her case has highlighted several other recent instances of it. Sarah Lee Circle Bear, a Lakota woman, was found dead earlier this month in a South Dakota jail. She had complained to guards about pain but was told to “quit faking” and instead isolated from other inmates. She died soon after. Or take the case of Ralkina Jones, another woman of color with health problems who was, again, found dead while in police custody in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. The problem is chronic and like most law enforcement abuses falls most heavily on communities of color, and heavier still on Black communities in particular.

Freddie Grey’s murder at the hands of Baltimore Police deliberately giving him a “rough ride” in a police van lent fire to a national movement. But Bland’s death and those of all the other women who finally have names and a modicum of press recognition (albeit a fraction of that given to male victims of police brutality) also reveal the often hidden extent of how this problem affects Black women. This is, without doubt, a crisis.

The federal government also tracks fatalities in jails and prisons through its Deaths in Custody Reporting Program (DCRP); typically, the vast majority of deaths result from illness or suicide, with homicides and unnatural deaths attributed in only a few percent of cases.

What Sandra Bland’s case reminds us of is that even in the cases of suicide, we must ask why taking one’s own life seems like an option in the confines of a prison cell. The answer should be obvious: especially in the US, prisons and jails are deliberately designed to suppress the spark of human life. Why should we be surprised that suicide claims so many within their walls? Thus, the tug of war over the exact means of Sandra Bland’s death, while important, obscures the fact that even if she did die by her own hand, the sheriff’s office still all but killed her. To place people into Kafkaesque situations of hopelessness that make suicide seem viable is a reckless indifference to human life that is murder in all but name.

The entirety of this edifice of execution and the mass murder being perpetrated on communities of color, and on Black women especially, is worth all the outrage that has been shamelessly poured into prosecuting that fool of a dentist. In theory, of course, people should have the bandwidth to handle both but the reality has been well marked by a number of Black activists who see the air being sucked out of the room by this leonine Twitter phenomenon.

Indeed, the #CecilTheLion rage bacchanal seems tailor-made to cater to cynics who cluck their teeth at “hashtag activism” and scorn all online organization as inherently compromised, privileged, and meaningless, save as an exercise in bullying and “shaming,” to use the cliche of the hour. But contrast it to the numerous hashtags spawned by the Black community’s fight back against police violence and their effectiveness as organizing and consciousness-raising tools — from the hashtags named for the fallen, to the heart-rending #IfIDieInPoliceCustody, to #SayHerName which elevated black women and shamed Democratic presidential candidates, to #BlackLivesMatter itself. These tags were not impotent rage for its own sake; they were exercises in survival, raising the voices of the unheard. They launched from already thriving Black communities on social media to create their own activist ecosystems that, themselves, would spawn theory, news, organizing tactics, relationships, and even humor in their turns.

The contrast to #CecilTheLion couldn’t be more stark. Like most well-intentioned hashtags that ultimately center on attacking an individual (in this case our dastardly dentist), it quickly degenerated into abusive back-slapping that rewards our worst impulses. No policy will change, little good will come from the spectacle, and its ultimate legacy will be a fusillade of death threats and a graveyard of parody Twitter accounts.

It accomplishes nothing and will serve only to briefly sate the ennui and cynicism of the more privileged members of our generation, while further slandering the power of the internet to effect real change. Meanwhile the grim rages of the sorry Cecil spectacle will be used to tar Black Lives Matter activists (who target a system rather than individuals) as unruly, threatening, outrage-mongers, while the beat goes murderously on.

]]>http://feministing.com/2015/07/30/instead-of-trolling-a-lion-hunter-we-should-sayhername/feed/0Alabama is trying to deny a woman an abortion by terminating her parental rightshttp://feministing.com/2015/07/30/alabama-is-trying-to-deny-a-woman-an-abortion-by-terminating-her-parental-rights/
http://feministing.com/2015/07/30/alabama-is-trying-to-deny-a-woman-an-abortion-by-terminating-her-parental-rights/#commentsThu, 30 Jul 2015 16:02:19 +0000http://feministing.com/?p=108775A woman imprisoned in an Alabama jail wants an abortion, as is her right. But her request to be released and escorted to the nearest clinic to get the procedure was denied. The sheriff said the jail has a policy of requiring inmates to get a state court order for any elective, non-emergency medical procedure outside the jail. The woman, represented by the ACLU, has filed a lawsuit challenging that policy in federal court as a clear violation of Roe v. Wade.

That’s not even the most outrageous part of this story, though. Alabama is one of those places where if you are a minor, or a prisoner, or anyone else who is forced to beg for permission to end their pregnancy from the court system, you will often find that the state has appointed a lawyer—a guardian ad litem—to represent your fetus. And in this case, the state is taking a unique tactic to protect the “interests of the fetus.”

Lauderdale County District Attorney Chris Connolly has asked a juvenile court judge to terminate the parental rights of a female prisoner who wants to have an abortion.

Connolly told the TimesDaily of Florence that if the judge grants the petition, the woman, listed in court filings as Jane Doe, will not have the right to ask for an abortion.

“Our position, if the termination for parental rights is granted, is that (the mother) would not have standing to obtain the abortion,” said Connolly.

Got that? The state is attempting to strip her of her parental rights over a “child” that is not actually a born child yet and arguing that if she doesn’t have parental rights, she has no right to terminate the pregnancy. Apparently, the DA’s basis for terminating her parental rights is that she’s facing a charge of “chemical endangerment of a child” — by which they mean “unborn child.” In recent years, Alabama has used the chemical endangerment law to arrest dozens of pregnant women for using a controlled substance, but the Huffington Postreports that “this appears to be the first case of the state using the law to prevent an incarcerated woman’s abortion.”

In other words, the state is arguing that since this woman has “endangered” her fetus by using drugs, it should now effectively become a ward of the state, and therefore the state can do anything it wants—including forcing her to carry it to term against her will—to protect it. And it doesn’t have to end there: “Does the guardian ad litem say what food she eats, what vitamins she takes, what exercise she does and every other decision regarding the fetus?” asks the ACLU’s Randall Marshall.

Of course, legally, this is a totally nonsensical move. Abortion rights are not rooted in parental rights and so terminating them would not at all impact this woman’s right to choose. Marshall expects that the ruling in the federal lawsuit, which is supposed to come down tomorrow, will “make clear that it is Jane Doe’s constitutional right to choose to terminate her pregnancy and that no action by state officials or any state court order can interfere with that right.”

But the state’s argument reveals the inevitable and terrifying end result of giving legal rights to fetuses: a woman utterly stripped of her autonomy and legally reduced to being nothing more than a vessel incubating a future ward of the state.

]]>http://feministing.com/2015/07/29/daily-feminist-cheat-sheet-623/feed/0Quote of the Day: “I didn’t expect the policy to change my behavior but it has”http://feministing.com/2015/07/29/quote-of-the-day-i-didnt-expect-the-policy-to-change-my-behavior-but-it-has/
http://feministing.com/2015/07/29/quote-of-the-day-i-didnt-expect-the-policy-to-change-my-behavior-but-it-has/#commentsWed, 29 Jul 2015 19:00:42 +0000http://feministing.com/?p=108760Oh ye of little faith, look at what the youth say.

At the New York Times, Sandy Keenan (not to be confused with Sandy Kenyon)interviewed a bunch of students at the University at Albany ,which now, because of a new New York state law, must obtain affirmative consent before sexual activity to avoid breaking school rules. Keenan asked the students about their sexual practices and knowledge of the new consent policy. Some of the responses were devastating. Many students didn’t know anything about affirmative consent. One young woman told the reporter that recently, to deflect unwanted sexual attention and touching, she had “pretended [she] was dead.” Another, when asked how many of the ten men she most respected on campus needed consent education, said 11.

But one junior, Tyler Frahme, warmed my heart. When Keenan first spoke to Frahme, he didn’t know about affirmative consent. But Keenan writes:

Since first hearing about the new policy, he said, he had been practicing consent almost religiously. He now asks for consent once or twice during sexual encounters with women he knows well, and four or five times during more casual or first-time hookups.

It’s getting to be a little more comfortable, he said. He crafts and poses questions like “You O.K. with this?” “Do you still want to go ahead?” and “Hey, you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

For reasons Maya and Reina have written about before, I don’t think affirmative consent is a silver bullet to end gender violence: it’s really just the bare minimum we can ask of each other as decent human beings, and a very early step toward building health sexual cultures. But so much resistance to affirmative consent is based on an assumption that sexual practices are set in stone, as though people couldn’t possibly have sex slightly differently tomorrow than they did yesterday. History, of course, instructs us otherwise, as does Mr. Frahme.